It's to be expected from a for-profit system.
A standard healthcare visit looks like:
- you have some concerning symptoms
- you schedule an appointment with a doctor that’s at least several days if not weeks away
- you go to the appointment, wait 40 minutes, see the doctor for 10 minutes and they either prescribe you a medicine, request labs, imaging, or refer you to a specialist.
- if it’s either of the latter two, you have to book another appointment and this one is likely weeks out.
- you go to get imaging or see a specialist and repeat the loop from the second step
The whole process takes months, there’s plenty of time to for consumers to choose options but they aren’t presented with any. If you get a prescription, you just take what the doctor prescribed and you won’t even know how much it costs until you go to pick it up. You have no idea what the labs or imaging cost either, nor any options to choose where to get them. The whole system is just a huge mess of misaligned incentives.
1. way too many regulations and lobbies that prevent any relaxation by scaremongering
2. unions that artifically constrain labor supply. doctors lobby to keep number of doctors low and regulatory capture preventing forign doctors from entering workforce. Uk for example imports doctors from india.
both political parties have their own agenda to not disrupt above . democrats love regulation and unions. republicans love corporate profits from regulatory capture.
healthcare is exterme opposite of freemarket despite the veneer
But "suppliers" know that demand has bo choice but swallow the prices and services.
Kind of like "cable companies" oligopolies but worse (see southpark espisode).
Health care should not be for profit.
You’re right. The Swiss system is deeply privatized, down to compulsory private insurance [1]. It just isn’t as opaque and corrupt as the American one.
Part of the problem with the American system is everyone is cynical with respect to reform, and has a singular bogeyman they’re convinced explains all of the problem, with zero room for multiple causation.
Not sure about that. But each person tends to have something like a single sentinel flag. E.g.: does medicare negotiate drug prices? And if there's a change for the better, they won't believe it's anything but a short term grift until they read it back as "true" from at least 16 different threads over the course of, say, 9 consecutive years.
Given that their representatives currently use phrases like "medicare advantage" to mean "off traditional medicare and on private insurance," that caution seems warranted.
It's not caution. It's reductiveness that contributes to the problem.
You might want to check that. In Cuba's case, not really unless you focus on their export of medical services. But for the greater case it's totally free. And qualitatively better than what the US provides.